> I saw this article today (see link below) but Helen Shaw's name wasn't attached but it is in the same vein. Why the sudden interest in going after this by the media?

Eewww. The proposed "solutions" for dealing with this great calamity of a problem are nauseating. People are stupid.

I noticed there were no details on the "research" that has "discovered" this great harm fairy tales do our children. Unless a mere count of references to this and that was the entirety of the research, which is downright idiotic. Maybe we should count references to crime in our local newspapers and attribute that to growing violence amongst teenagers or something.

What idiot activists don't get -- yet what, strangely enough, I believe children do understand even if it's subconsciously -- is that beauty and ugliness in fairy tales is usually metaphorical. Physical beauty is a metaphor of a beautiful heart, whereas ugliness is how evil is represented. In those particular fairy tales that actually address physical appearance as the exclusive basis for a judgment -- such as Snow White, The Ugly Duckling, and Beauty and the Beast -- the message is to look deeper than the deceptive surface.

Regardless, the article's claim that fairy tales of beautiful women make little girls insecure is only true in the context of an unsupportive home. Until a certain age, children believe what they are told about how smart they are, how talented they are, and how handsome or pretty they are. If fairy tales do anything at all to foster insecurity, it's going to be to reinforce what the children's home lives have already instilled.